Asserson Law's staff in their Tel Aviv office (Photo: Tom Gregory)[Missing Credit]
Earlier this month, an exhaustive report compiled by Asserson solicitors working alongside a team of Israeli data scientists led by computational neuroscientist Haran Shani-Narkiss claimed that the BBC had breached its own editorial guidelines more than 1,500 times in its Gaza war coverage.
The UK’s national broadcaster, the Asserson Report alleged, had developed a deep pattern of bias against Israel. Articles published online, broadcast news and podcasts expressed significantly more sympathy for Palestinians, while conflict reporting was said to have downplayed the horror of October 7 and over-emphasised Israeli militarism.
This failure was particularly galling, Asserson said at the report’s launch, because of the BBC’s responsibility as a publicly funded body to remain objective. In response, the corporation said it rejected the report’s AI-driven findings and that judgments on impartiality could not be made by examining words out of context.
Though Asserson, as a long-term supporter of Israel and campaigner against BBC bias, could be accused of partiality, Shani-Narkiss said, the report itself has a scientific basis. “We scientists found a way to bypass partiality,” he said. “This was a rigorous, cutting-edge pipeline to quantify things that could not be done before.” The firm behind the document was first launched by Asserson as a bid to forge a career in Israel that would allow him to put his experience in the English legal system to good use.
Born into a deeply assimilated family in the UK, he had a “perfect British sort of education” at a private school and Oxford before he made aliyah in 1990.
He found success, marrying and passing the Israeli bar, but, having discovered that his Hebrew was inadequate for a top legal career in Israel, he moved back to London to practise commercial law. By 2005, however, Asserson was back in Israel. Following the invention of the internet, the idea that a lawyer based in Jerusalem – where the firm’s first office was located – might practise in London was no longer totally absurd.
The ability to communicate online did not mean launching the firm was easy, however.
“I’d gone from a law firm of about, I think two or three thousand lawyers where I was a senior partner to a law firm with one lawyer,” Asserson said. “Which was a very frightening experience.”
He continued: “It wasn’t, for instance, acceptable to send documents electronically to a barrister. And it wasn’t really acceptable to send a letter by email. In my very first case, the court decided that I didn’t legally exist because I wasn’t in England.”
But with an ability to charge significantly less than his London-based rivals owing to the lower cost of doing business in Israel, Asserson also soon discovered that bright Jewish lawyers were keen to join him.
“There were lots of very, very talented young people who did not realise you could be a lawyer and work in Israel. Essentially law is very language based and if you don’t speak fluent Hebrew, then you kind of give up the idea of ever moving to Israel,” he said.
“Suddenly there was an opportunity to be in Israel and not have to change your language or culture. So that that meant that people were knocking on the door of a quality no tiny firm would ever attract. They were not coming because they wanted to work with me. They were coming because they wanted to live in Israel.”
One of the earliest to join Asserson was Baruch Baigel. Now the firm’s head of disputes and ranked as a global expert in this area by Chambers, a legal guide, he is a graduate of Cambridge and Harvard who preferred the idea of aliyah to a career in London’s so-called Magic Circle of law firms.
“The conventional wisdom was to stay in England, make some money, and then go to Israel with some financial security rather than going with nothing and starting from the very bottom,” he said.
“But I think Trevor had this vision for what could be, and it felt very much like a start-up, which was very much in line with the kind of start-up nation ecosystem in Israel at the time. I was just inspired to join Trevor and the small team that he had then.”
It is “certainly not the well-trodden path,” partner David Haffner added. Despite working in a major city firm in London, he said, he had always wanted to live in Israel.
A two-hour time difference with London that allows Asserson to begin, and sometimes complete, work before their clients have reached their offices also helps, said managing partner Howard Rubenstein.
Since its inception, Baigel said, the firm has been defined by its ability to take on major cases despite its geographical distance from London’s courts.
“I’ve been exposed to cases and work which junior lawyers at any of the big firms would be very lucky to work on because junior lawyers in the big firms are normally given quite menial stuff to do,” he said, reflecting on his early career in Israel.
In one instance, the firm represented businessman Israel Perry, who was found to have defrauded Israeli pensioners out of millions of pounds. He was, Baigel still maintains, wrongfully convicted. When the British government issued a claim under the Proceeds of Crime Act in an attempt to seize hundreds of millions of pounds worth of his global assets, he hired Asserson to defend him.
The firm challenged the jurisdiction of the British authorities and won after taking the case to the Supreme Court. Asserson even convinced the English courts to come to them and take a deposition of Perry in the Azrieli Center.
After several more years of litigation, the government gave up, dropped the case and paid Perry’s legal costs. It was, Baigel said wryly, a “fair amount of money”.
For Perry to be able to hire English lawyers operating within the English legal system who work in Tel Aviv and speak Hebrew, was, he added, “the perfect storm”.
Following the October 7 attack, however, the firm’s priorities shifted. While other Israeli companies had seen their lawyers recalled to the IDF, Asserson, largely staffed by olim with no military record, wanted to find another way to assist the war effort.
Sayana Turpin-Aviram, a British-born associate, said: “I’ve got my regular casework but given everything going on I feel that I should be doing something for the wider situation.”
At first, she said, she and Asserson Law colleagues complained specifically about the BBC’s coverage of the al-Ahli hospital bombing, in which a reporter claimed on air that Israel was likely to have been behind it before a clear picture of the blast had emerged. After receiving a “disappointing” response the firm decided to widen its inquiry.
For many of Asserson Law’s British-born staff, the fight against BBC bias has been deeply personal.
Trainee lawyer Katy Nicholson Lord, who made aliyah just months before October 7, said she had previously defended the BBC’s record on impartiality to her Israeli husband and his family. After working on the report, however, she no longer would.
“I was shocked and I was just disappointed more than anything because I do – did – read and watch the BBC and I think especially on the Arabic front some of it was just jaw- dropping to the point where you think, “Are they having us on, is this a joke?’” she added.
The firm is now seeing people express an interest in making aliyah and joining them “who perhaps would not have done so before,” Rubenstein said.
